[In the following review, Clark examines Mason's skillful use of details in Feather Crowns.]

Most of Feather Crowns takes place in 1900, at a time when rural preachers are predicting apocalypse and in a place where people discover signs of God's will in everything from meteor showers to “the way a pair of birds sat on a branch.” Many people believe an earthquake will happen on the New Year; at “the dawn of the new century,” it will herald the Last Judgment.

Instead, Christie Wheeler, a young wife and mother who lives outside Hopewell, Kentucky, gives birth to healthy quintuplets. Hopewell's mayor proclaims the births “the eighth wonder of the world,” and the town's preachers declare them a sign of something good, perhaps the Second Coming. The extended Wheeler household of tobacco farmers quickly becomes a magnet for journalists, quacks, do-gooders, barren women, women who have lost babies and every sort of entrepreneur and curiosity seeker.

Yet even with this turn-of-the-century, apocalyptic backdrop, the real strength of Bobbie Ann Mason's third novel lies in its presentation of homely details—details that so often go unnoticed, the daily events that ultimately express the vast design of creation. Christie Wheeler becomes empowered through her capacity to ask questions and her ability to experience each moment of daily life to its fullest. And this long, satisfying novel offers readers who are willing to slow down the same chance to see ordinary life anew.

This is not a sentimental look at country living, by any means. Bobbie Ann Mason, who grew up in western Kentucky and now lives in rural Pennsylvania, clearly understands both the satisfactions and the claustrophobia of agricultural self-sufficiency. Farming within a tight-knit extended family is equal parts blessing and curse, just as Christie finds that being special is also a blessing and a curse.

At first, the pressure from preachers, doctors and venal relatives pulls Christie far from what she herself knows is right. She allows those who converge around her to tell her what to do with the babies and what to think. The preacher says it's her duty to show the babies to the public; the doctor decides they should be fed sweetened cow's milk, even though it makes them colicky; and everyone assures Christie that all the public attention and handling the babies receive is good for them. Eventually, Christie realizes that these directives are either self-serving or ignorance masking as expertise. If there is a meaning to this unusual occurrence, she has to find that meaning herself:

She knew what to blame at last. She saw the central flaw in her desire to understand why such an extraordinary thing had happened to her. It wasn't why it happened—that couldn't be known; it was what the world made of it that was at issue.

(p. 417)

Much of Christie's transformation takes place during a two-month tour of the South with huckster-cum-educator W. Greenberry McCain, who offers her and her husband, James, a chance to tell their story. The tour exploits them, of course, but it's also the only opportunity they'll ever get to engage with the wider world. By the time they make their escape from McCain, Christie has made decisions about her own fate and that of her babies. When she returns home, she no longer believes preachers can know God's will: “You could torment yourself into knots trying to figure out where you stood with God.” And she defies the color bar by visiting with the colored woman, Mittens Dowdy, who helped her nurse the quintuplets.

Those who have read Mason's short stories and previous novels will recognize a familiar theme in Feather Crowns: how ordinary people create meaning through the simplified and caricatured self-reflections the public world offers them. In her well-known first novel In Country, the protagonists think through their own experiences with Vietnam by referring to episodes of MASH. In “The Ocean,” which is one of Mason's award-winning collection of short stories Shiloh, when a retiree remembers one of his naval battles in World War Two, he thinks, “The explosion was like a silent movie that played in his head endlessly, like reruns of McHale's Navy.”

Like other Mason characters, particularly the long-married couple in her short novel Spence + Lila, Christie Wheeler suffers from an “excess of loving” that both delights and bewilders in its intensity. This love is released in passionate, committed, marital sex, an unusual combination in modern fiction. It is a combination Mason has evoked vividly in the past, and she does so again in Feather Crowns:

He pulled out her hairpins one by one, and her hair fell down, the tresses swinging almost to her waist. Her clothes loosened, and as the garments slipped away she could feel her hair hot against her back. The room was dark. … She kept seeing mental pictures of her father's forge: the squeeze of his bellows, the fire of his furnace. She was warming herself near James's fire, close enough to scorch.

(pp. 49–50)

Most important, this great capacity for love also infuses ordinary moments. For Christie and other characters from Mason's stories, gardening, milking cows, or just being alive and observant in the outdoors offer pleasures as transcendent as a loving sexual union.

Sometimes a small event would soar through her heart on angel wings: the train going by, the frost flowers forming on the window. … For a moment, then, she thought she was the black-bird or that she had painted the frost flowers herself. … She had always felt like that.

(p. 12)

Tragedy or pain brings this world-embracing eroticism into closer awareness. Loss reveals the powerful outlines of love, but love does not fix anybody or improve anything. It can only appear and, in the midst of great pain, engender a deep, abiding gratitude that renewal and birth are still available to all of us.

In the end, Feather Crowns is crowded with life and the dailiness of events—a family picnic, an engagement, the details of cooking, making doll clothes, curing tobacco—another hallmark of Mason's fiction. For example, “A trio of women known as the Wiggins Sisters performed. The tallest of the three played a guitar and all three sang—skillfully and fervently, as if their lives depended on what they were doing at that moment.” In another brief but vivid encounter with the many people who crowd this novel: “The stringy-haired children trudged away from the fat-lady's tent. They moved so slowly, as if they had on weighted shoes. But they were barefooted.”

Unlike the apocalyptic talk of preachers, the crescendos in Feather Crowns are small and develop slowly. The title refers to two nest-shaped clusters of feathers in the quintuplets' mattress. In one pivotal scene, Christie's epileptic niece, Little Bunch, tears into their bolster, revealing the feather crowns for all to see. Horrified aunts and cousins point out that these crowns are a sign of death, though Christie's beloved aunt Amanda says they are also portents of eternal life. In any case, Christie isn't satisfied with these explanations; she broods on what the birth of her children really signifies:

“Then why would God even write out a sign if He doesn't want us to know?” she asked. “Why would He even bother?”

“It's a test,” said James. “He wants us to trust in Him and stop trying to figure everything out.”

“It plagues my mind,” Christie said. “Everything is a question.”

(p. 269)

During her travels with James and Greenberry McCain, Christie finds a medical encyclopedia in which she learns about single-celled animals and the germ theory of disease. Alone among her friends and relatives, Christie discovers science, and in discovering this, she deduces that the feather crowns are actually made by a tiny parasite. There is a logic to the odd clusters, but the logic is of this world, not the next. Understanding this alternative way of making meaning frees her, finally, to trust her own ideas and desires.

In fact, Christie Wheeler finds that a scientific explanation can provide a precise and optimistic opening to wonder—a pathway out of passivity and toward true mystery. As she says near the end of the novel, “There's so much in the world that nobody understands, or even notices.” Feather Crowns insists that modern life has not robbed us of the fundamental capacity to revere and rejoice, if only we pay attention to the design in the details.